Once a Month Meals’ redesign focused on helping visitors and members quickly get to the content they wanted.

Once A Month Meals (OAMM) is the premier site for all things freezer cooking. From their patent pending MenuBuilder product to the bustling community of members who love to cook and have fresh food on their table without the hassle of cooking from scratch every night.

In early March, OAMM launched a five month long project that was focused on bringing a streamlined experience to visitors and their current members. All facets of their technology were improved. The site design upgrade was the most notable, and it now focuses users on their lists of carefully curated menus and recipes. This change makes it much easier to search menus, recipes, and become a new member if the visitor chooses.

Joel Taylor (Technical Director for OAMM) said that the project was a huge undertaking as there are many different technical facets to how OAMM operates.

“OAMM runs on two custom Ruby on Rails apps, a WordPress install for its frontend and an Ember.js frontend for MenuBuilder. We built a new API from MenuBuilder to enable dynamic content to flow through WordPress to our visitors and members. Previously menus and recipes had to be published in both systems, and human error had twice the chance to introduce itself – not to mention double the workload. Now, we publish in one system, and it automatically populates throughout all our apps.”

Joel mentioned that DataYard was critical to their success in providing dedicated support throughout the redesign process for their server infrastructure needs.

“We had a couple meetings with DY in person discussing the new goals of our site and what technology we’d need in place to make our page load times sub three seconds. We have five web nodes all communicating to each other and three caching systems. If anyone knows WordPress well, they know how critical it is to cache well. We couldn’t just flip on page caching due to dynamic content for our logged in members, therefore caching our API responses and other pieces of communicated data was vital for page speed. Being able to talk through our infrastructure options with DY was one of the best hosting provider experiences I’ve had.”

The OAMM team worked very closely with their long-term partner, Sparkbox. Sparkbox provided OAMM with content strategy, their new design and a lot of the heavy lifting on the API.

“OAMM came to Sparkbox several years ago with a belief that families should eat together. With this vision, we helped them turn their previously cumbersome, manual process into a robust, customized piece of software that allowed users to create their own freezer menus—thanks to the years of experience the OAMM team already had in perfecting menu plans. We were excited to work with OAMM during the redesign to turn this robust backend system for managing menus and recipes into an API that now drives the entire site. The redesign also included updates to the brand to further evolve it into the smart and approachable product it had become. It has been a lot of fun to help grow and adapt the site with the OAMM team.” – Rob Harr, Vice President, Sparkbox

Tricia Callahan (President and Owner of OAMM) says that the redesign project had been long overdue.

“The greatest goal for our recent redesign was to create a cohesive experience for our users between our community and our product. As we worked to achieve this goal, it was important that we also increase site performance and functioning. This was no easy task as we have several appliances feeding into our WordPress site so we knew we needed some unique solutions. Throughout the process we received tailored support and recommendations from the DataYard team that made the cumbersome and delicate process of this redesign easier to manage. Most notably, they took their time to carefully consider how these changes could be made without disrupting the experience of our current users, giving me the peace of mind as a business owner.”

DataYard was thrilled to be a part of the project, and is proud to continually deliver the service, uptime, and performance that any high volume and subscription driven site demands. From both the technical and business perspectives, the match is one made in heaven.

“Working with Joel at OAMM on their environment is always enjoyable and collaborative. Continuing to improve the site performance – from an infrastructure and server application perspective – is always the primary goal, and something I’m happy to be a part of.” – Ryan Chewning, Systems Administrator, DataYard

 “The intersection of creative firms and DataYard as an infrastructure partner is one which seems incredibly natural. Every project I’m involved in with folks like Tricia, Joel, and the team at Sparkbox is awesome. When design, development, and infrastructure work together towards a common and communicated purpose, it’s a beautiful thing.” – Alek Mezera, Account Manager, DataYard

Visit Once A Month Meals’ site for delicious inspiration and membership information!